1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to image processing apparatuses, and more specifically, to a image processing apparatus where, for example an image forming apparatus such as a digital copier, a printer, facsimile, or scanner can be installed in or connected to the image processing apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
In digital copiers, for example, in order to realize sort function or the like for processing image data of plural documents, it is necessary to provide an image storage part such as an HDD (Hard Disk Drive) having a storage capacity for storing the image data of plural documents.
However, in a digital copier including only an image storage part having a small storage capacity, the amount of storage of image data of the document is limited, and the storage capacity may be exceeded during reading the document image. In other words, while the image data are being read, a case may happen where a request of a user cannot be accomplished such as a case where image data of all documents cannot be stored.
Because of this, for example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 5-37747 describes an image storage device wherein an expected data size of the entire document is calculated based on the amount of image data actually read from a part or a specific page of a document or the expected data amount of a single document based on past information and the number of the documents. If there is no sufficient free storage capacity in the storage part (image storage part), a warning is issued.
Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 5-37747 also describes that compressibility of the image data is made high for storage by converting multi-value data to binary data in a case where the free storage of the storage part is expected to be small.
However, in the image storage device described in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 5-37747, only whether all the image data of the document can be stored is determined. In other words, in this image storage device, whether a part of the image data can be stored is not shown to the user. In addition, a specific value of the part of the image data is not shown to the user.
This is because the device described in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 5-37747 is merely the image storage device and only whether all the image data of the document can be stored is important in the request for this device.
In the image forming apparatus having a copier function such as a digital copier, output is performed with input (storage) and therefore the user wishes to know not whether all the image data of the document can be stored but whether a divided part can be stored.
However, such demand cannot be met by the image storage device described in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application Publication No. 5-37747. In addition, in order to read the image data of one page of the document, it is necessary to read all the image data of one surface of the document. Therefore, it takes time and effort of the user for determining whether storing the image data can be achieved.